


ode to a nightingale

by MaryPSue



Category: The Sandman (Comics), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Exactly What It Says on the Tin, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 07:55:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7706698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death, as Jean comes to know her, is easeful indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ode to a nightingale

**Author's Note:**

> This, uh. This exists now. Hopefully I haven't butchered either series' lore too badly, it's been a while.
> 
> This is not a direct sequel to, and really doesn't have to be read in conjunction with, my previous fic [raise you like a phoenix](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7277098), but they do play well together and I never pass up an opportunity to shamelessly plug my own writing.

Jean wakes, abruptly, from a nap she hadn’t realised she was taking.

Looking around the coffeeshop, she’s not sure how she could have fallen asleep to begin with. The place is packed full, every table surrounded by clusters of colourful-looking people, and the constant buzz of conversation and occasional burst of bright laughter nearly drowns out the music, a low throbbing bass like a heartbeat. The cappuccino machine behind the counter lets out intermittent blasts of steam, and it has to be this that makes the walls look fuzzy and far away. Despite how small and cozy the coffeeshop feels, it’s impossible to tell how much space it actually occupies.

The girl sitting across the table from Jean grins toothily, her smile very white against the ink-black of her lipstick, and pulls a piece of her cinnamon bun apart with black-painted talons. “Finally! Want something to drink? They make a killer frap here.”

Jean doesn’t say anything, just taking in the stranger across the table from her. It’s impossible to accurately guess the woman’s age, though if pressed, Jean would say she was somewhere between seventeen and forty. Her hair is as black as her nails and lips, and lifts gently away from her head like a dandelion about to explode, her dark eyes carefully lined with kohl in exquisite swirls and sharp points, and a silver pendant, a cross with a loop in place of the vertical bar above the crossbar, dangles against her black shirt. Even for someone wearing all black, she seems unusually monochrome, especially in this warm, colourful setting.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Jean is just as certain that she knows this stranger as she is that they’ve never met in her life.

The stranger must see the confusion on Jean’s face, because she offers another smile and pushes the plate holding the cinnamon bun towards Jean, into the centre of the table. “Don’t look so worried, nothing’s gonna hurt you. Here, have some of my cinnamon bun. I can’t eat the whole thing myself, the ones they make here are huge. I think they want you to share them.”

“Where  _is_  here?” Jean asks, looking around again, this time with clearer eyes. Where are the coffeeshop’s walls? Why can’t she see anyone’s face?

The woman across from Jean shrugs, and pops a piece of cinnamon bun into her mouth, somehow licking sticky cinnamon sugar off her fingers without smearing her lipstick. “Technically we’re from two universes that don’t intersect, but I’ve got some friends who know some people. Ever wonder what it’d be like to be a vampire? A boy? The lost princess of a kingdom of people who can control fire? A florist? They can hook you up.”

“I… think I’m all right, thanks,” Jean says. She’d be more skeptical, but then, after discovering you can move things with your mind, very few things really strain your disbelief. “Why are we here?" She leans forward, tears off a chunk of the cinnamon bun, looking at it carefully. It certainly smells like a fresh cinnamon bun. The sugar-syrup drips tantalisingly down her fingers, pooling in the hollows between them. "If you want to use my body or my mind or my untapped potential or something to take over the world, you’ll have to get in line.”

It tastes like a fresh cinnamon bun, too. Light and fluffy and almost too hot to eat, the sugar bursting with spice and sweetness both.

The stranger’s laugh is as light and as sweet as the bun. She leans forward, resting both elbows against the table and her chin in both hands. “Nope, no plans for world domination here.” Her eyes flick up to meet Jean’s, and she grins, the kind of grin that makes Jean feel like the two of them share a secret that no one else in this vast, tiny coffeeshop could possibly understand. “Everybody ends up under my domain sooner or later, anyway.”

Jean’s eyes dart down, to the stranger’s pendant lying flat against the table, trying not to linger on the milk-paleness of her breasts pressed against the table under her black tank top. “You know it’s just a name. Phoenix. It’s not like the myth. And it’s not me." 

She doesn’t say, It’s the evil space ghost that ate my brains, because people get uncomfortable when she talks like that. She doesn’t say, It  _is_  me, it was me the whole time, just because it was the evil space ghost that ate my brains doesn’t mean it wasn’t me, because if just the part about the evil space ghost makes people so uncomfortable then Jean is smart enough to stop there.

The stranger smiles like she knows everything Jean isn’t saying, and takes another chunk of cinnamon bun. "I like the mocha frap they do here,” she says. “But I think you’d like the s'mores one more.”

Jean drums her fingers against the table.

She knows she won’t get a straight answer, but she asks anyway. “Can I go back? After?”

The stranger tips her head to one side. “Can you?” Something bright and proud and slightly terrified swells in Jean’s chest as she realises there’s genuine curiosity in the stranger’s voice. 

The stranger drags one black-clawed finger through the sugar-syrup that has dribbled off the cinnamon bun onto the plate, popping it into her mouth thoughtfully. “Mm. It’s not exactly a pomegranate.”

Jean reaches over for the cinnamon bun, tears it roughly in half. 

 

...

 

"There’s a woman named Cinamon. Cinamon Hadley,” the woman in black remarks. They’re sitting on a park bench, in the sun. Jean can hear the rush of water behind them, dogs barking and bicycle wheels whirring, the flap of wings and warbling coo from the pigeons that gather around her companion’s feet. As Jean watches, the woman in black throws a handful of breadcrumbs, scatters them across the red gravel path in front of the bench. “I don’t really remember what I looked like before her.”

She turns to grin up at Jean, and for some reason Jean can’t shake the thought that her sparkling teeth are just little bare, white protrusions of her skull. “Probably skinnier.”

Jean can’t help herself. She laughs, taken off-guard. Her companion’s smile widens, and she scoops another handful of breadcrumbs out of the white paper bag she holds. Instead of throwing them, though, she sets down the bag and takes Jean’s hand, holds it palm-up, drops her own handful of breadcrumbs carefully into it. “Here, do you want to try?”

“I’m not sure I can make it as graceful as you do,” Jean admits.

“It’s all in the wrist.” The woman in black demonstrates, a quick flicking motion that Jean copies. It sprays breadcrumbs over the path in an elegant arc.

“That’s pretty good,” Jean says, as the pigeons bob over, and then, because she can’t resist, “Did you pick that up from swinging a scythe?”

The woman in black narrows her eyes at Jean, but she doesn’t look upset, more like someone caught by a good pun. “Well, combine harvesters just don’t have the same metaphorical weight.”

Jean smiles, shakes her head. One of the pigeons pecks curiously at the toe of her sneaker, and she gently shoos it away with her foot.

“I can remember my first day at Xavier’s,” she says, listening to the quiet rush of water behind her, feeling the heat of the sun and the cool spray on her shoulders. There must be a fountain there, but she has no desire to turn and look. “It was nineteen sixty-something. I was thirteen.” She reaches over to steal another handful of breadcrumbs from the bag. “I was so nervous I knocked over just about everything I walked past, Scott included. I’m still not sure if any of it was telekinesis or if I was just really clumsy.”

The woman in black throws her head back and laughs, shoulders shaking, bare white arms shining in the sun. When she finally calms down, she has to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand. Jean is secretly envious of the way her eyeliner doesn’t smear. “Sorry, that’s really cute.”

Jean shrugs, glancing down at her own fingers, the chipped green polish on her blunt nails. “Well, I also remember nebulas.”

Her companion leans back against the bench, spreading her arms out along the back. Jean’s been to enough drive-in movies to know it isn’t a coincidence that the gesture puts one of her startlingly white arms around behind Jean’s shoulders. “I’ve never personally run into the Phoenix Force, but - sometimes you get echoes, doubles, across realities, you wouldn’t believe this guy I go for takeaway curry with - anyway, it seems… Well, as mysterious cosmic forces bent on some inscrutable goal that lies beyond human comprehension but looks an awful lot like ‘total universal destruction’ on the surface go, you could do worse.”

“Thanks,” Jean says.

“Hey, no offence, one of them’s my sibling,” the woman in black says. She seems to consider it for a moment, then amends, “Sort of,” with a grin.

“Sort of your sibling, or sort of a mysterious cosmic force bent on some inscrutable goal that lies beyond human comprehension but looks an awful lot like 'total universal destruction’ on the surface?”

The woman in black cants her head to one side in thought. “Yes.”

“Well, that clears things right up,” Jean says, and the woman in black laughs like a waterfall.

“And Marvel Girl sounds adorable,” she continues. “But I’m glad I got to meet you.”

Jean meets her eyes. They’re as black as her clothes, her hair. Blacker. Jean can’t tell where iris ends and pupil begins. They are twin holes cut through space and time to the long-distant heat-death of the universe, to the void after the stars. They are the place where all stories end.

“Well,” Jean manages, fumbling the words on her suddenly-thick tongue, “I’m glad you put on some weight.”

The woman in black’s laughter scares the pigeons all around them into startled flight.

 

…

 

They’re in a tiny concert venue, this time. The band is playing a repetitive, droning song that Jean wouldn’t be surprised if she fell asleep during. The band members’ puffy black hair obscures their faces, turned down towards their shoes.

“You cut your hair!” The woman in black’s voice is surprised and delighted. “I like it. It suits you.”

“I think…” Jean says, holding up a hand in front of her face. She’s never dared to say this to another living soul. “I think maybe I am just some kind of malevolent cosmic entity that just thinks it’s Jean Grey.”

The woman in black, sitting beside Jean at the bar, leans her chin on one hand, casually toys with her bottle of Heineken with the other. Her eyeliner is extra elaborate tonight, her tank top covered by an old-fashioned high-collared black lace blouse with with full, puffed sleeves narrowing to slender cuffs, but her curious smile is exactly the same.

Jean grabs her own beer for something to hold onto. “It could happen, couldn’t it? You steal a body, all those memories are hard-coded into the neurons…” Condensation drips down the neck of the green glass bottle, slithers down over her knuckles. “It’s never quite the same, when I come back. _I’m_ never quite the same. I - forget things.” She passes the bottle from one hand to the other, sliding it across the bar on its own trail of condensation. Anyone eavesdropping on their conversation, she thinks, somehow, wouldn’t be nearly so surprised by its content as anyone attending any other concert in the world tonight. “Like how to be a person.”

Her companion grins ruefully, and spins on her bar stool. Her cuffs, Jean notices, are fastened with tiny pearl buttons. If she looks closely enough, even in the dim light, Jean can tell they’re carved into miniature skulls. “Sorry, can’t help you much there. I’ve never been one, and neither have any of my siblings.” Her smile practically incandesces, and she shakes her head. “Well, no. I shouldn’t speak for them. Especially not Delirium, who  _knows_  what they get up to.”

Jean manages a soft laugh, and turns back to the band. She thinks the song has ended and another one started, but it’s hard to tell with all the droning. The lead singer - at least, Jean thinks he’s the lead singer - shuffles his feet slightly, scuffing pointed black boots covered in buckles across the stage. That seems to be the closest any of the band will come to dancing.

“I do know one thing about people,” the woman in black remarks, and Jean looks over to see her leaning forward with her elbows propped on her knees, chin in her hands, watching the undulating black-clad crowd with a fond smile. “They come to an end. That’s why they do everything they do.”

Jean lifts the bottle in her hand to her lips, takes a long drink. She thinks she really prefers sparkling wines, but as beers go, she figures she could do worse. 

She doesn’t take her eyes from the unreadable logo on the drum kit as she asks, “Is that why you make me feel so much like one?”

The hand that closes over hers, the fingers that twine between hers, are a shock of cold. Maybe it’s just from the way the woman in black has been holding her beer.

Jean can feel the other woman’s eyes on her face as she asks, “Is that why you make me feel the same way?”

Jean isn’t certain how to answer that, so she takes another sip from her beer instead and watches the band. The music’s sort of starting to grow on her.


End file.
